Former President George W. Bush spent Monday, September 21, 2026, raising money in Dallas, Texas, for Republican Senate candidates in several states. Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who carries President Donald Trump’s endorsement in his own state’s Senate race, was not among them.
Those on hand for the September 21 Dallas event included Republican Sens. Dan Sullivan of Alaska and Jon Husted of Ohio, former Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan, Rep. Ashley Hinson of Iowa, former Sen. John Sununu of New Hampshire and Minnesota candidate Michelle Tafoya. Invitations listed Bush as a “special guest.”
The host committee leaned heavily on the George W. Bush era, with names such as former Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers and former Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. Some of the donors invited have also given money to Paxton’s Senate campaign.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, hosted the evening, which benefited six Republican Senate candidates through the Maintain the Majority joint fundraising committee. Cornyn lost to Paxton in what was the most expensive Republican Senate primary ever. The proceeds are earmarked for sitting Republican senators and other GOP hopefuls in the midterms, and the committee is supporting candidates in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire and Ohio.
The Republican carrying the party’s banner in the host’s home state never made that roster. Nobody in the gathering of old-guard Republicans endorsed Paxton publicly, which left the former president collecting money for Senate Republicans across the country while skipping Paxton in the marquee contest unfolding in his own state.
A Texas Seat Republicans Fear Losing
The omission arrives at a delicate moment for the GOP. Some in the party have warned that Paxton could cost Republicans a seat Texas usually delivers without drama, and several polls have put Democrat James Talarico ahead of him in a race both parties rank among the most closely watched and consequential in the country. Voters decide it November 3.
The consequences reach far past Texas. A Talarico win would do a great deal to put the Senate within Democrats’ reach, and the GOP is also widely expected to lose control of the House in November. No Democrat has won any statewide office in Texas since 1994 — the last time Texas elected a Democratic U.S. senator was even earlier, in 1988 — and a Talarico victory would hand his party its first Texas Senate seat in decades.
Paxton has now received more than $109 million in outside spending, while Cornyn and his allies spent over $90 million losing the May primary. Paxton’s campaign was recently bolstered by about $15 million from MAGA Inc. and $54 million from a PAC aligned with Senate Majority Leader John Thune.
Impeachment, a Divorce and a Primary Win
Paxton carries plenty of baggage. In 2023, the Republican-controlled Texas House impeached him on accusations of corruption, bribery and obstruction of justice. He was acquitted by the Texas Senate, though corruption allegations kept dogging him afterward, and his wife filed for divorce, citing “biblical grounds,” after rumors of an affair surfaced.
That record is exactly why establishment Republicans rallied to Cornyn during the primary. Thune was among the figures who endorsed the incumbent, and party veterans argued that Cornyn was far likelier to hold the seat and to win the moderate and independent voters any statewide Texas campaign requires. Bush gave $5,000 to Cornyn during the primary, according to sources familiar with the event. Primary voters went the other way, and Paxton took the nomination anyway.
Not the First Bush-Paxton Collision
This is not Paxton’s first run-in with the Bush family. In 2022 he beat George P. Bush, a nephew of the former president, for the GOP’s attorney general nomination in Texas.
The Bush name is still stitched into Texas institutions all the same. Texas A&M University opened the Bush School of Government and Public Service in 1997, building it around a conviction held by President George H.W. Bush: that there is nobility in serving the public. The school continues to train students in College Station, Washington, D.C., and online.
Rove Breaks With a Texas Republican
Bush is not the only Republican old-guard figure putting distance between himself and the party’s newer standard-bearers in Texas. Karl Rove, the veteran GOP strategist who steered Bush to victory in both the governor’s mansion and the White House, has said his ballot in the Texas Railroad Commission contest will go to Democrat Jon Rosenthal rather than Republican Bo French.
Rove said his vote against French followed a post on X in which French circulated an image of University of Texas students who are not white cheering a college football win. The caption: “The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”
In an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal, Rove wrote that the party now houses religious bigots who lump Muslim American patriots in with terrorists, antisemites who hide behind innocent-sounding questions, misogynists devoted to hypermasculinity, and conspiracy theorists chasing clicks for profit.
The Dallas event underscores a problem for Paxton that Trump’s support does not resolve on its own: in Texas, the party’s old guard is, at minimum, declining to vouch for him in public. The Senate race being fought in the very city where the checks were written was not among the campaigns getting a share.